In this episode of It Depends, Matt and Tenille speak with Dr Luke Craven, CEO of PLACE Australia (Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment), a first-of-its-kind effort to connect, resource, and strengthen place-based initiatives nationally.

Luke shares PLACE's defining insight from engaging with 53 place-based initiatives across the country: that effective place-based work is fundamentally about governance, not geography. He outlines the three principles -subsidiarity, accountability, and partnership - that PLACE believes underpin meaningful place-based practice, and explains why being "domain neutral" allows them to act as ecosystem engineers, connecting practitioners solving similar challenges across early years, net zero transition, criminal justice, and beyond.

This Episode is a thoughtful conversation about what it takes to move place-based approaches from novel to normal, and why being tight on purpose but loose on the how might be the key to lasting systems change.

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Check out past episodes on Resilience in Place (#12 with Gretel Evans), Complex Adaptive Systems in Emergency Management (#8 with Todd Miller), Value for Money in Evaluation (#11 with Julian King) to explore threads that came up in this episode.

Links to resources mentioned or relevant to the episode:

• PLACE Australia – including their Practice Framework
• Place Matters UK – PLACE's counterpart organisation in the United Kingdom
• The Good Shift – Ingrid Burkett's work on systems approaches and visual storytelling
• Fire to Flourish – Paul Ramsay Foundation initiative supporting community-led disaster recovery
• Logan Together – place-based initiative in Queensland focused on early years
• Regen Melbourne – place-based urban regeneration across metropolitan Melbourne